Saturday, November 24, 2012

For a game built upon the concept of slipping by unnoticed, Hitman: Absolution is certainly doing the opposite. It’s standing conspicuously amongst today’s fad-driven modern shooters and me-too multiplayer hopefuls, middle fingers extended. A slow-paced, single-player focused sneak ’em up, Absolution looms in stark opposition to many of the most pervading trends in gaming today. It cares not for the overly delicate, their minds rendered dull and flabby after years of being prodded through corridors blasting anything that breathes. Absolution delights in letting players skulk through it expending few bullets at all. It’s a game that wants to let you think for yourself.

A game that wants to remind you that trial and error done right equals satisfaction, not frustration.

For those of you counting at home it’s been 2368 days since Hitman: Blood Money was released, give or take. That’s a long time between drinks. It’s nearly six-and-a-half years. In video game terms that’s somewhere in the Cretaceous Period. In actual fact the besuited Agent 47 and his barcoded dome have spent the vast bulk of this generation on the sideline. Hitman: Absolution has been a long time coming, a fact fans are acutely aware of.

The pressure to deliver, then, is high. Blood Money may be a dinosaur in some respects but it remains a cult favourite adored by its faithful fans. Six-and-a-half years on the team at Io Interactive must ship a successor to it worthy of the wait

The good news is, they have.Above everything, Absolution is a game that wants you to experiment with it. It refuses to be rushed through, rewarding brains over brawn. It wants you to spend time inside it, methodically picking your way around and discovering morbid new ways to snuff out your unfortunate marks. Like Blood Money before it, your targets here can be executed in a host of ever-so-slightly sickeningly different ways. Returning Hitman fans won’t settle for a simple bullet to the back of the head; they’ll immediately be on the lookout for the tell-tale signs of a classic Hitman kill opportunity. Some of them are more subtle than others but, like Blood Money, they’re all there, waiting to be discovered. A couple of the game’s kills are more tightly choreographed for dramatic effect, complete with a brief cutscene of your deserved victim sucking in their last breaths, but most of the game’s kills – two dozen of them at least – are traditional Hitman fare. How you take them out is in your hands. This is a slow-paced, measured experience. This is not Medal of Duty: Modern Warfighter Ops. Impatient action junkies need not apply.

The way Absolution itself plays is very much a refined version of what Io attempted with its previous effort, but gone are most of the quirks Hitman diehards were happy to overlook in Blood Money. 47 feels far more connected to the environment rather than skating about on it, and successfully sneaking up on a target from behind with your signature fibre wire is no longer quite as fickle an exercise. It’s all a lot more organic and a lot less stiff.

Furthermore Absolution adds a host of additional abilities for 47. 47’s limited use sedatives, for instance, are no longer necessary because of his close-quarters combat skills. Sneak up on an enemy or NPC unawares and you can grab them and either subdue or kill them with your bare hands. It’s just like Blood Money, where you could simply take people as a human shield and then knock them cold with the butt of your pistol when your syringes ran dry, only without all that rigmarole (although, of course, you can still do that too).

There’s a cover system that allows you to properly exchange fire with enemies when things go pear-shaped, rather than being stuck out in the open desperately strafing left and right. When you’re playing as you should, stealthily and patiently, the cover system is even more useful, allowing you to spring from behind it as enemies pass by to quietly choke them out, or snap their necks. You can also fake surrender too, disarming your would-be captor and taking him hostage.

There have been tweaks to the shooting system too. Point Shooting, which is a slo-mo power-up that functions not unlike a similar power-up in Splinter Cell Conviction, works fine but Hitman veterans will almost certainly never use it outside the couple of instances it’s required throughout the game. Rabid Hitman fans simply won’t be doing the levels of indiscriminate killing that would warrant the use of Point Shooting. You can’t get Silent Assassin ratings by mowing down scores of henchmen in slow-motion. Better is Precision Shot, which allows you to gently squeeze the trigger to steady your aim before actually firing. It feels very natural; it’s a hugely better solution than the normal “click-here-to-hold-your-breath” malarkey.

Then there’s Instinct Mode, which is basically 47’s intuition represented visually. Instinct Mode remains a true bone of contention for some but at its most fundamental level this replaces the previous, god-like minimap. 47 can sense nearby enemies and you can note where they are in relation to him. How you use it beyond that is really up to you. New Hitman players can use it as a crutch, noting enemy patrol paths or objects of interest. Veterans can simply refer to it sparingly or dial it down entirely. On the higher of the game’s five difficulty settings it’s automatically neutered anyway.

On the topic of difficulty settings, there are five – and they cover the whole spectrum. Easy is exceedingly so, and Purist is insane. The sweet spot for a first play through is probably Normal or Hard. Enemy reaction times are quite forgiving in Normal and the game will tolerate some sloppiness on your part at the expense of realism, but it’s a good setting to build up an understanding of the levels. Hard ramps things up. It’s interesting to note that enemy NPCs aren’t just sharper on higher difficulties; there are also more of them. Depending on your approach you may well find your undetected route through a level on Normal completely thwarted by an added patrol on Hard.

When things do go sour the adjustments to how enemies react to your presence is also welcome. If you’re spotted and you can contain the situation by subduing or killing all nearby witnesses before they inform others an alert won’t be raised. This is a refreshing change from Blood Money, where one foul up would dispatch every enemy on the map against you like heat-seeking missiles.

Absolution looks good. There’s arguably a bit too much lighting bloom, particularly when harsh light begins to glint off 47’s cue ball bonce, but it’s not going to be something that’ll have you dropkicking the disc down your driveway in disgust. It’s darker and grittier than Hitman titles past but the visuals shouldn’t raise many complaints. It looks its best at its busiest; when you’re threading your way through the game’s thick crowds. It’s these moments when you’re keenly aware you’re playing something a little different. The levels are nicely dressed and the cutscenes are well-produced; it’s a solid effort all around.

It sounds great too. The dynamic score which picks up as the action mounts is well implemented, and there are quite a few moments where the audio design really pops. Approaching and opening a closed door to a loud, bustling bar, for instance, sees the sound launch from a subtle hum of chatter and muffled music to a roar of raised voices and bass. It’s well crafted. Hitman games are all about atmosphere, and Absolution gets it right.

There are 20 levels but many are broken up into a series of stages. The key difference between this and Blood Money is the levels are segmented. Instead of one big level, say, like the Heaven and Hell Club, levels in Absolution are often completed in discrete chunks. For instance, there may be one or more areas that need to be stealthily navigated and passed through before you can reach the area where your target is. Some levels have several targets spread over multiple stages. The Attack of the Saints level, for instance, has you slowly taking out all seven leather-clad nun assassins over the course of three distinct areas. The controversial trailer released featuring 47 taking them out in a tightly-compressed flurry of moves cribbed from several viewings of The Bourne Identity really did this level a disservice. They're nothing alike.

Overall Absolution is a success, although not universally so. The change to the disguise system, for instance, is a good idea not fully-formed. It makes sense that NPCs wearing the same type of clothing are able to recognise you as an imposter; it means you can’t just don a disguise and stroll through the game's levels. It’d be too easy. The system should scale, however. It’s logical a small group of janitors would recognise a stranger in their midst; less so that every Chicago policeman knows the faces of every one of his thousands of fellow officers so well that he can always spot an intruder. Both the cover system and the Blend system, where 47 casually dips his head and obscures his face as he passes threats, are Io’s answers to these.

On normal difficulty it does create a certain degree of absurdity when simply ducking down behind a parked car and breaking line of sight or surreptitiously covering your face with your hand can allay suspicion, but a balance does have to be struck between credibility and playability. If you’re finding things too easy I’d advise you to progress to the game’s incredibly unforgiving Expert and Purist modes, where enemies react far faster.

The nature of Absolution’s story-mode, which features 47 on the run and, for several very early levels, without even his signature Silverballers, is also quite different from Blood Money. It may leave some fans a little wanting considering you no longer select your preferred equipment before missions and such, but Contracts mode is there to fill that gap. Contracts mode is Absolution’s true sandbox, where you can create your own custom hits within the game’s levels with its clever play to create system, choosing whatever NPCs, weapons or disguises you want. Better still, you can challenge your friends to complete your contracts faster and more efficiently than you. Pausing a level in story mode will also present you with an opportunity to play a user-created Contract instead.

Contracts mode will be the lifeblood of Absolution once you’ve clocked the story mode, but that’s not to say Io hasn’t been experimenting with ways of hooking players in hard. Absolution may be steadfastly single-player focused, but Io has embraced the 2012 trend of connectivity. Upon completion of a level Absolution will award you with a score, and that score will be instantly compared to both your friends playing Absolution, the rest of your country, and the rest of the world. You can see how far above or below your score is tracking in relation to your friend average, your country average and the world average.

The score system takes some working out, but basically signature and accident kills for your designated target net you big bonuses. Being spotted and killing civilians and non-targets see significant penalties. You can subdue people for a small score penalty, but you can scrub that penalty by hiding their unconscious bodies. You’ll get an idea for different solutions for levels via the awards at their completion. They’ll give you hints of traps you perhaps didn’t spring, or items, weapons or disguises you didn’t find.

THE VERDICT

Like Dishonored before it, it’s actually a true pleasure to play a game that lets you tackle it from multiple angles. After several years of increasingly totalitarian games where you’re very much following a pre-determined path, it’s nice to have a game that doesn’t just encourage improvisation; it requires it.